Mykola Zhuravel

Meeting

2005

Mykola Zhuravel was born in 1960. He is a Ukrainian artist who graduated from Kyiv State Arts Institute with MFA degree in monumental painting in 1986. The artist spent his childhood on an apiary where his father attended to beehives. This remained a major influence on Zhuravel’s oeuvre as he masterfully fuses nature and art by creating monumental abstract compositions. The artist often uses an image of sphere or a colony of spheres that takes over part of his abstract painting. In other instances, Zhuravel depicts figures of mother and child walking across the composition. His abstract works are often stories some with whimsical scenes and some with political connotation. Mykola Zhuravel exhibited extensively in the USA with his first exhibition taking place at the Ukrainian Institute of America in 2004. A major exhibition entitled ‘Apiary’ took place at Zorya Fine Art gallery in Greenwich, CT in 2007. A catalogue with foreword by Sam Hunter, accompanied the exhibition. Presently, Zhuravel had to leave his hometown, Kyiv due to war in Ukraine. The artist is now living in Toronto, Canada where he plans to establish himself.